Open Letter to VPSLand : a Review of a Long Term Customer Using VPSLand for Trading

Through the past 4 years I have been a faithful customer of VPSLand and perhaps up to 3 months ago I believed that this was one of the most reliable and trustworthy services out there despite the ton of bad reviews online. I have always believed that one should judge a service through personal experience and therefore I had always said that – despite what this people might say – I was having a good experience with VPSLand and had not experienced problems beyond those which are to be expected from any shared VPS provider. However the objective of this open letter is to let you know why this opinion has changed and why the more than 100 USD I was giving you every month will now go to another VPS provider going forward. Yes, you have LOST a 4 year old customer and hopefully by reading this letter you’ll decide to make some changes that will prevent you from losing many more.

I have to confess that VPSLand was my first VPS provider and my intent from the start was to use them for trading as I realized that my home connection was – if anything – not the most reliable. VPSLand offered an uptime guarantee and cheap services which were very reliable on my first setup and continued to be in this way for at least a few months. After this period of time I started having some reboots but this is to be expected from any shared VPS hosting provider and I therefore simply took necessary measures to make sure the trading setup would remain active even when these problems appeared. Overall this service was good for a shared VPS provider and after getting new and updating my old servers this service continued to be within what I would consider the expected reliability of such a cheap VPS service.

Now let me start to talk about how and why things changed. Last year I got a new shared VPS on one of your cheapest plans as a means to host some additional small accounts which are really not worth the “space” on a dedicated VPS (which is about 150 USD per month and reserved for my “big” accounts) this server was working correctly for the first 3-5 months and then things started going south pretty fast. Almost one reboot every 5 days and -added to that – the service went down several times, inherently compromising the trading of these accounts and therefore giving an important blow to the reliability of my account evaluation procedures. However the problem for me was not that the server went down or that it had some problems – I understand no one is perfect – but my problem relates to the way in which you reacted to these events and what ended up happening (the picture above is a good summary of how I felt treated by the VPSLand customer service through several support events).

To tell you the truth the support I received from you is not what I would expect from any company that considers their business and customers seriously and this is the main cause of why I am writing this letter to you. Trust me, I run a full time business all by myself and I know what it is to deal with customers and I also understand that the most important thing is to put yourself on your customer’s shoes. When a server went down and I contacted your support I received several unhelpful answers just saying “we have taken this to our senior admins” even though I expressed many times that the issue was critical and that I needed a time frame to know when this would be fixed. Added to this your staff lied to my face about the fixing time repeatedly and in the end they just seemed to ignore me instead of providing me with a useful answer. It is true that problems may take time to fix but it is different to say “it will be fixed within the hour” (with the problem still there 4 hours later) than to say “we’re working on it, it is going to take at least one hour but I will update you personally if it takes any longer with the reason why this happened”.  I understand that problems happen but there is simply no reason why you simply cannot ask and send a real answer that is actually helpful.

Perhaps the worst part is the way in which your support personnel handled these issues (aside from a guy named Daniel who was the only remotely helpful person from the more than 4 I talked to on each support requiring event) your support staff was simply arrogant, unwilling to help and even ignored me and seemed to be complitely unwilling to help in any meaningful way. To tell you the truth it seems completely absurd to run a business in this way in which you simply ignore the needs of the customer and do things in whatever way you see fit. If it was my VPS company I would provide quick real answers about the nature of each problem, provide a time frame for fixing or further notice and would have given customers adequate compensation for any problems which are outside of what is expected. Now please do not confuse competent with “nice” although your staff was quite polite and always seemed “helpful” the real help they provided was nil and their attitude behind this “smiling façade” was anything but pleasant.

Perhaps the worst part of it all is what ended up happening. After one of my servers had crashed repeatedly for the past few months and I had requested the server to be moved or the issues to be fixed in some way on August 16 2011 (after many months of problems) the server failed for the final time. Support was extremely unhelpful (as in any case that requires the “senior staff”) and I ended up receiving an email in which a support guy finally told me that my VPS had “crashed” and all the data had been irrevocably lost (of course, I always have my own personal backups for things like this).  Without offering any compensation or any apparent care beyond this email your support staff was simply telling me that all my data had been lost. Again, if this was my company I would have offered at least a few months of free service or a free upgrade of some sort plus a direct contact phone number for future problems but then again, I would care for my customers and their actual service experience.

In the end your company has the problems which one would expect to be typical of a shared VPS environment (to some extent) and I am not blaming you for having technical issues (anybody can have them) but you completely lack any sense of customer handling and you never put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Sadly I believe this will cost you dearly in the long term and I sincerely hope that this letter will either cause you to change your business practices or it will cause your current customers to change their VPS provider as soon as they can. There are many other cheap VPS providers with reliable customer service from which perhaps accuwebhosting and commercial network services are the best. You should definitely take a hint from them and learn how to treat your customers because it is not only the quality of the services you provide but how you react to problems which determines the quality of your business.

I am therefore sad to say that I have removed everything positive I have ever written about your company (as it is no longer true) and I will no longer renew my subscriptions after they expire in a few days. You have lost a 4 year customer and potentially thousands of dollars of subscription payments going forward, all because you preferred to save a few dollars in customer service and treat your customers with arrogance and fail to address their needs and promptly fix or at least inform them about their issues. My advice is to properly compensate customers for bad problems, have a direct chat support in which the user can be informed about problem status and fixing time frames and give a direct phone contact number for anyone who has a problem that will take longer to solve. I would also strongly advice you to re-train your support staff. For any customers of VPSLand out there, I encourage you to make your own judgements and change VPS providers if you feel that you deserve a customer support which is simply better for the amount of money you’re paying. Also please note that ForexVPS seems to be the same company (or at least shares the same whois address), please correct me if I’m wrong. 

I would also like to point out that I use shared VPS providers primarily because they are a cheap and efficient way (with good providers) to execute automated trading strategies on large numbers of accounts with small amounts of money but for large amounts of money I would definitely recommend – and I do this myself –  trading through a true dedicated server. Although the price is significantly higher (80-200 USD per month) you will get a lot better performance and reliability as the server is a true real dedicated machine for you.

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15 Responses to “Open Letter to VPSLand : a Review of a Long Term Customer Using VPSLand for Trading”

  1. McDuck says:

    Daniel,

    now that you are moving to a workplace with continuous internet connection, you might consider run MT4 locally. It takes some tweaks, as automatic reboot on bios if electricity goes off, to have a copy of all in a laptop in case one has not access to to the computer, some .bat scripts to control the basis when one just has slow connections, etc. I can say the thing works for me.

    Best.

    • admin says:

      Hi McDuck,

      Thank you for your post :o) This doesn’t work for me as the electricity costs for the number of servers I would need plus backup internet connection plus enough UPS to keep computers up for at least 10 hours (double the average power loss period) is far greater than the cost of having dedicated and shared VPS services. In your case doing this may make sense but for my particular setup and needs it really makes more sense to have everything within dedicated and shared servers (depending on the accounts). In reality a dedicated VPS or a good shared VPS are many times better than a home solution (proper data center, triple redundant internet connections, no power costs, no power losses, no risk of children or pets damaging stuff, fires, floods, etc). Of course it might not be the best solution for all people but for my particular case it is by far the best in terms of cost and reliability (especially now that I have changed VPSLand for far more reliable providers on the shared servers I was using). Thanks again for posting!

      Best Regards,

      Daniel

  2. Brian says:

    In October 2010, I started using Commercial Network Services (CNS) as my VPS and have been pleased with their service. I haven’t had a single unplanned reboot nor any lost data.

    The only time it reboots is when I manually run Windows Update on weekends and a reboot is required.

    Granted, I cannot comment to their customer service since I’ve never had any technical issues.

    • Brian says:

      I have to give another comment in regards to CNS. Today (Saturday) I received an email from them outlining their plan of action in dealing with Hurricane Irene. They mentioned their backup strategy, plan of action for handling issues, and offered mitigation ideas in case all else fails (for example, if New York is out of power for two weeks and their generators run out of fuel). They also gave a website for realtime updates.

      THAT’S what I want in a VPS provider.

  3. Scott says:

    Given your experience, I’m very interested to know if ForexVPS is the same company. I’ve been using them for about 7 months, and my experience has been good so far. I’ve needed to contact customer service several times, and the response has been helpful and speedy. They have never lied to me or made promises they didn’t
    keep. I’ll make a post in the forum, and would like to hear about other people’s current experience with them.

    • admin says:

      Hi Scott,

      Thank you for your post :o) I can tell you that I have never had accounts with ForexVPS so I cannot give a personal opinion, I also don’t have precise knowledge of whether or not they are the same company as VPSLand but they share the same whois address (as said on the article). Perhaps – if they are the same company – they treat customers better on ForexVPS because they consider the customers have more “critical” needs ? Let us know what you’re able to find out on this matter!

      Best regards,

      Daniel

      • G says:

        I had vspland during 1 month I found it useless and started with SWVPS.COM
        they are fine

      • Ymleong says:

        This is in regards to pipcloud.com which is a subsidiary of VPSland.com. I didnt realised this until I read the bottom “fine” print. To be fair, I was with them only 2weeks. So far I hosted my MT4 and run with MT4 signal provider from MQL5 ommunity, (that is, you need to subscribe it either via MQL5 community website or via MT4 Signals tab)

        After just 1 hr of signup realised that their MT4 is NOT the latest. There is NO live chat and it took them 50hours to install the latest version. Do note that MT4 version 445 current version 451 are able to subscribe to signals, lower than this, sorry not introduce yet. So I had to wait while they….. Shouldnt a VPS company who cater ONLY for MT4 hosting provides update to MT4? Also do note that PipCloud uses (i think) linux and I am NOT able to access the MT4 to run the update, only to trade or upload EA’s. I am also not allowed to load or download any .exe, as they have specific folders to enable you to upload EAs, indicators, charts, etc related to MT4 and NOTHING else in between, as its not real windows and likely run on shared hard disk

        Then after testing with FXOpen MT4, I wanted to test with RoboForex (to compare which brokerage quotes is best to run a scalping EA), and guess what NO roboforex MT4. If it was windows based I could have downloaded the MT4 from Roboforex in about 2mins from signup to download the demo acct.

        As usual their customer service staff took their own sweet time to answer and respond to the request, and this time it was FIVE days! After 2nd email on 3rd day, they replied back on 5th day that this was done and updated to latest version!

        After this, I then realised that sure I pay USD14.99 per month for a simple to use VPS, but if I wanted to run MT4 by different brokerage side by side (to compare results by same EA), I will need to pay for another VPS with Pipcloud. Given their customer service? I would rather make appointment with my dentist for root canal treatment

        So after 2 weeks, I cancel my subscription and placed it to expire at end of billing period, since they DONT do refund. My request was on 14/Jan and its now 24/jan as I was writing. (that is, I click “send cancellation request” via my customer manage acct screen on 14/jan, no support ticket was created)

        I had submitted 3 tickets (1st ticket was on 16/jan, 2nd 21/jan, 3rd 24/Jan) to ask for acknowledgement of cancellation and meanwhile I had DELETED my credit card information to prevent fraud charges from them (I hope this is not stored in their database, but when I click edit and delete it off, it just simply show blanks, when internally the database still actually stores this).

        FYI, I have also (now) realised that some customers have complained that they get charged even AFTER cancellation (perhaps they didnt delete the credit card info, which is a violation of security, as a merchant they CANT store credit card information when customers had deleted it).

        U may wonder why i freak out on whether they acknowledged since I deleted the credit card info. This is what they told me that I had to “inform” them if cancelling my services. So I am doing the informing THREE times. If they dare to charge me, I will immediately file a dispute and investigation with my bank. Today I clicked the “cancellation request” again and the system correctly informs me “You had made a cancellation request already”

        Whats with them? If the cancellation request is automatically processed, then WHERE is the email that informs me abt the status. If they told me to contact them rgs cancellation, WHAT are they doing for TEN days, sunbathing? In Tahiti on vacation? If they DONT want customers to contact them rgds cancellation, why say so (that is, before signup I asked abt cancellation and how to go abt it, and support staff that answered me open a ticket/send email to inform us)

        Even though I did specify that cancellation is effective only upon end of subscription period, I should still have a auto generated email to inform me that my cancellation request has been received and they will send me a status once it was reviewed or whatever!

        What a CHEEK! I am the CUSTOMER but after requesting cancellation via the system in my customer area, must inform you, then must wait for you to approve my cancellation? I have to give a good reason to cancel???

        You are at least smart enough to stay away from them, and nice enough to share with us your bitter experience. You are RIGHT! STAY AWAY from PIPCLOUD.COM as well before you have no more hair or nails or $ left in your acct!

  4. Ian Lim says:

    I’m also getting very lousy support from vpsland.com.

    I also noticed they even save the money on the https connection :P

    i hope they can get my issues resolve since my server has been down for 8 long hours….

  5. fred says:

    I was a client for many years with vpsland until last week.I had a perfectly tuned windows vps server which didn´t need any maintenance whatsoever.Had to go to a hospital visit for a week and when I returned my domains weren´t accessible, weird.when I wanted to start a terminal session without success with my regular credentials same luck.THEY DELETED EVERYTHING, EMAIL ARCHIVES, PHOTO ALBUMS, DATABASES, EVERYTHING!!!!!
    It seems that they sent a single email the 22nd indicating that they were going to migrate and the 25th everything was gone (never could read my emails ´cause I had no server).
    Way to go smart businessmen, way to go…

  6. Tasos says:

    I can understand you

    I had 4 commercial sites (eshops) on VPSLAND.
    At the beginning the server was crashing very often. NO COMMUNICATION at all. I just was waiting when my sites will come back on-air. (4-5 days later)

    On November-2012 , i show my server down, and after asking them about this issue, i received a message (2-3 days later) saying that they decided to change my plan, to migrate to cloud servers (WITHOUT any previous NOTICE). My sites went offline for 5 days and the best …. ALL MY DATA LOST. Just deleted. Nothing else.
    Damage : no orders for 5 days + many many many days to re-build my 4 sites + lost of all serious recently business-emails and other recently data.

    Then i searched internet about them and i found thousands of victims like me.
    SOMEBODY MUST STOP THEM !!!!
    THEY ARE CAUSING GREAT DAMAGE TO BUSINESS !!!
    THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR DATA AND YOUR WORK AT ALL !!!!
    THEY DO EVERYTHING THEY CAN, TO HAVE DISAPPOINTED CUSTOMERS !!!

  7. GroupIT says:

    Nobody in their right mind should do business with vpsland.com

    They will delete your data without warning when they feel fit.

    Avoid at all costs!

  8. allan says:

    They took my money without my order, I asked for refund but of no luck still waiting for almost 2 months now. Avoid this company VPSLand.com, they are scam! horrible and terrible company

  9. ali says:

    My production site is down for more than four days and no response from VPSland.com support. Never witnessed such a irresponsibility from any company that is based in US.

    Do not use them for production site or at least make backup twice a day if you really have to use them

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